You can buy drives that came from EMC storage arrays such as the VNX off eBay for dirt cheap these days.

You can find Seagate and Hitachi/HGST variants such as the HGST 2TB 7.2K SAS Server Hard Drive HUS723020ALS640 0B26315 3.5″ that run at 6GB/s for about $25 shipped. You can also find enterprise SSDs and drives from other manufacturers that have a non-standard format applied as well. Note that these are typically true SAS drives and the connector is different from your average computer’s SATA interfaces. That being said, these are enterprise grade drives which means that they will typically last much longer than consumer grade drives.

There’s one little problem… EMC formats these drives with a Block size of 520, which is incompatible with most systems. Fortunately, you can do a Hard Drive Block Size Conversion.

The easiest way to fix these is in a server running Ubuntu with a SAS HBA that can pass the hard drive straight through.

Get the current block size of a hard drive or SSD in Ubuntu!
sudo sg_readcap /dev/sg2

^^ This is all that has to be done. You can now shut down, move the drive to another system and it should work fine. With a properly configured system, you can do this hot while it is running as well, but do this at your own risk.

Additional info:

Get a hard drive or SSD’s serial number:
udevadm info --query=all --name=/dev/sda | grep SERIALNote that ID_SCSI_SERIAL will typically be the SN printed on the drive and the two other ID_SERIAL outputs should match the WWN of the drive.

On occasion, I have found that I have the need to not only wipe a Fortinet Fortigate Firewall’s configuration, settings, and logs, but to actually verify that the contents of the logs were wiped out. The script below will allow you to do this.

I would recommend using PuTTY with logging enabled to document your progress. With some modification this may work on other Fortinet devices. Note that you will have to modify the script to add any custom VDOMs you may have on your device.

I would highly recommend backing up your configuration and any logs that you need to retain, as I know of no way to undo this. Use the following script at your own risk!